The Scottish-born Benson, long a Life magazine photojournalist, has collected pictures from six decades of a career covering politics and war, pop culture and celebrity. Above, Jack Nicholson in Billings, Mont., in 1975, during the filming of “The Missouri Breaks.”

The “playboy life” was created out of heartbreak, or at least that is the version Fraterrigo tells: Hugh Hefner is betrayed by his fiancée, formerly a fellow student at the University of Illinois. He calls this “the most traumatic experience of my life,” but they marry despite the infidelity. He finds himself unhappy — later saying the marriage was “over before it began” — and leaves her, intent on pursuing the good life. As a story of revenge, it is a powerful one: Playboy magazine makes its debut in 1953; Hefner amasses a fortune and moves into the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, where beautiful women dote on him. “I must say most sincerely that I am one of the happiest, most fulfilled guys on this good earth,” he says. “I dreamed a very big dream, and it came true.” Over time, Hefner is the victim of his own success — “a casualty of the ‘lifestyle revolution,’ ” Fraterrigo writes, as one-night stands become available outside the pages of Playboy — and profits begin to tumble in the ’70s. Sadly, the book fails to capture even a wisp of the dream. Employing dense prose and opaque analysis (feminists “did not attack the Playmate as a simple representation of a nude female body, but as a constructed package of meaning, couched in this specific context”), Fraterrigo, an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, makes penthouse parties, bachelor pads, office sex and even the “Playboy Bed” sound dull — like Champagne without the fizz.

Representative Barney Frank is serious when it comes to the role of government: “We are talking about lessening human misery and improving the quality of human life.” But he is also quite funny: in the 1980s, standing 5 feet 10 ­inches and weighing 270 pounds, he went on a diet, saying the owner of the snack bar in the cloak room of the House of Representatives would now have to “apply for a Small Business Administration disaster loan.” Still, you might be surprised to discover that enough things have happened in his life to warrant a 500-page biography. Though perhaps less so when you see the arcane material Weisberg has included, from the fact that one of Frank’s sisters skipped a grade to his remarks during a Congressional debate over personal use of federally financed frequent-flier miles. The book has a holiday-card spirit, and Weisberg notes that “Barney loves being chairman of the Financial Services Committee”; moreover, he is “a master of thinking on his feet,” reads “with startling speed” and also, by the way, once hired the author for a job as a subcommittee staff director. In his office, Frank has posted one of George Washington’s rules of civility: “Be not tedious in Discussion, / make not many Digressions.” Unfortunately, Weisberg does not follow this advice.

THE AWAKENERA Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties.By Helen Weaver.City Lights, paper, $16.95.

Weaver met Jack Kerouac in November 1956 and found him “absurdly handsome,” writing in her memoir that he had “a high forehead with a lock of hair that fell over it” and “a kind of perpetual squint, as if too much light was coming into his eyes.” They had a tumultuous two-month affair, and she recalls their fights as well as the tender moments, like those during their first night together: “I can still hear the way he muttered ‘perfect breasts’ under his breath, as if he were talking to himself or taking notes in one of his little nickel pads.” She paints a romantic picture of Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s, when she worked in publishing and hung out with Allen Ginsberg and the poet Richard Howard and was wild and loose, getting high and falling into bed almost immediately with her crushes, including Lenny Bruce. Kerouac, of course, was averse to editing, claiming: “Writing comes from God. Once you put it down, it’s a sin to go back and change it!” Weaver, now a noted translator, would have been wise to edit — or, better yet, delete — passages on astrology, Buddhist practices and “animal communication.” Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read. Her descriptions of the Village are evocative, recalling a time when she wore “long skirts, Capezio ballet shoes and black stockings,” and used to “sit in the Bagatelle and have sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist of lemon.” Early on, she quotes Pasternak: “You in others: this is your soul.” Kerouac’s soul lives on through many people — Joyce Johnson, for one — but few have been as adept as Weaver at capturing both him and the New York bohemia of the time. He was lucky to have met her.

At a jazz club in New York, Wynton Marsalis was nearing the end of a ballad, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You,” when someone’s cellphone beeped. Hajdu, who was at the show, wrote on notepaper, “MAGIC, RUINED.” It was an all-too-familiar experience. Evidently being a music critic and a culture reporter is hard work: he uploads an album onto his iPod, drinks beer at a blues festival and browses in a Midtown comics shop. Yet a certain lack of joie de vivre haunts these essays, as he hammers away at easy targets like Starbucks (“as if money means nothing and the word ‘frappuccino’ means something”), MySpace (“not quite as democratic as it seems”) and suburbia (“a landscape of chain outlets and theme restaurants”). Throughout, he displays boomer bias, which means the prospect of new songs by Joni Mitchell is “cause to let out a hearty crow,” while the White Stripes offer “gimmickry.” And he’s pedantic: about Philip Glass, he writes, “Distinctiveness, which is something different from distinction, tends to lead to recognition.” At the club, Marsalis paused after the cellphone rang, then improvised from its tone, winning over the audience and providing a lesson in art and humility. You can be furious at the world because it does not appreciate the music, or you can adapt, beautifully; all too often, Hajdu takes umbrage and stops there.

Tara McKelvey, a fellow in the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.”

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Books »A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2010, on page BR17 of the New York edition.